New Restaurants in Coronado for 2026: What's Open Now

By The Sea served its first branzino on August 12. Doug and Lara Hamm, the Coronado couple behind Black Swan Hospitality, had the 6,500-square-foot space at 1300 Orange Avenue built out, staffed, and seating 245 guests within a few months of breaking ground. Walk four blocks north to the Ferry Landing and you'll find a restaurant that has been "coming soon" since roughly 1999.

That gap is not a coincidence, and it is not really about demand. Both properties sit in one of the most food-hungry stretches of San Diego County right now. The difference is who owns the dirt underneath them, and that difference explains almost everything about how Coronado's dining scene has moved this year.

What Actually Opened While You Weren't Watching

If you've been avoiding Orange Avenue on a Friday night because you assume it's still the same six restaurants it's been for a decade, here's what changed:

• Dive, atop The Bower hotel at 1417 Orange Avenue, opened in early 2025 as the island's first rooftop bar. Three stories up, with sightlines running from Point Loma to Baja, it's built around the restored neon "diving girl" sign left over from the site's earlier life as the Villa Capri motel. Brunch runs daily now.
• La Corriente, the Baja seafood spot from the team behind Chez Loma, took over the Coronado Historical Association's cafe space at Orange and Isabella in late summer 2025. That corner has swallowed three previous restaurants, most recently L'Orangerie, which lasted under a year before its chef went back to France. Diego Girault, who is part owner of La Corriente and also runs operations at Chez Loma, has watched all three attempts fail from the same vantage point.
• The Baby Grand, a 31-room hotel from CH Projects at 1315 Orange Avenue, opened May 14, 2026, directly across from the Hotel del. It arrived with two restaurants built in: Night Hawk, an open-fire Greek concept set into rock-formed booths outdoors, and Fallen Empire, a reservation-only oyster and champagne bar hidden behind a statue in the lobby and capped at roughly 35 guests at a time.
• By The Sea, the Hamms' Mediterranean project at 1300 Orange Avenue, opened August 12, 2026, sourcing from A Mano Cheese, Connelly Farms, and JR Organics, with a menu that runs from bay scallop crudo to lamb cavatelli.

Four openings, one strip of road, all under eighteen months. None of them needed a public agency's sign-off on a decades-old lease. That's the pattern worth noticing.

Why the Ferry Landing Is a Different Kind of Property

The Ferry Landing looks like one place. It is legally two.

One parcel, next to Il Fornaio, belongs to Ferry Landing Associates, which signed a 40-year lease with the Port of San Diego back in 1997. The terms required two waterfront restaurants by 2008. Il Fornaio, the first one, opened in 1999. The second restaurant did not happen for another 27 years, cycling through unrealized plans until Social Syndicate finally broke ground on what's now called Maiden Coronado, a $10 million, 12,000-square-foot project with a 4,300-square-foot wraparound patio facing the San Diego skyline and the Coronado Bridge. It's currently targeting a late 2026 or early 2027 opening.

The rest of the Ferry Landing, the 13-acre retail and restaurant complex with 24 subtenants, is a completely separate leasehold, run since the 1980s by Port Coronado Associates. That lease was set to expire June 30, 2026, and the last twelve months of that story read like a civic drama:

1. In October 2025, the Port announced it would not renew PCA's lease, citing roughly $17.5 million in deferred maintenance. Coronado officials called the process opaque.
2. By December 2025, the Port reversed course after PCA submitted a revised proposal addressing the maintenance concerns, and sent the matter back to closed-session negotiations.
3. On June 23, 2026, the Board of Port Commissioners voted on an option-to-lease agreement giving PCA up to 12 months to secure financing, permits, and signed letters of intent for at least a quarter of the center's leasable space, in exchange for a new 35-year lease.

If PCA hits those marks, redevelopment construction actually moves up a year, to 2027, with the build timeline cut from 36 months to 24. Rent under the new deal starts at a $600,000 floor and climbs in steps toward nearly $2 million by the end of the term, tied to a share of the center's sales.

"Coronado has waited long enough, and it was important to get this issue resolved to yield the type of Coronado Ferry Landing that the city deserves."

That's the framing one Port official gave the deal, and it tracks. Two parcels, one address, two completely different clocks. Maiden Coronado could open by early 2027 because its landlord dispute settled years ago. The shopping center around it is only now getting a green light to start planning its own rebuild.

What This Means for Your Actual Week

If you live here, the practical question isn't "is Coronado's food scene changing." It obviously is. The question is which of these places you can walk into tonight and which ones are still a year or two out.

Open and bookable right now: Dive for a sunset drink, Night Hawk for weekday lunch starting at 11:30 a.m. before the dinner crowd catches on, By The Sea any night except Tuesday, and La Corriente if you're willing to bet against that corner's track record one more time. Fallen Empire is open nightly but small enough that walking in without a reservation is a gamble.

Still under construction: Maiden Coronado, with a target window of late 2026 into early 2027. Still in the planning stage: whatever eventually replaces the current mix of shops and restaurants at the broader Ferry Landing complex, pending PCA meeting its financing and permitting deadlines over the next year.

There's a second, quieter split happening too. The south end of the island, near the Hotel del Coronado, has absorbed most of the last few years' hospitality investment, including the hotel's roughly $500 million renovation that brought in Veranda, Nobu, and the Sun Deck. The north end, around the Ferry Landing, has historically seen less development. Maiden Coronado is the first real attempt to close that gap, and its timeline is now tied less to appetite and more to how quickly a decades-old lease structure can actually move.

The Short Version

Coronado's restaurant map changed faster in the last eighteen months than it has in a decade, and almost all of that speed came from properties with straightforward commercial leases. The one corner of the island still catching up is the one where the landlord is a public port authority working through a leasehold negotiated in the 1990s. Knowing which is which tells you whether to make a reservation this weekend or just keep an eye on the Ferry Landing for another year.

Jorge Alvarez works and lives blocks from Orange Avenue, and keeps a close eye on what's changing across the island, from the dining scene to the market itself. If you're curious about how any of this connects to what's happening with Coronado real estate, or just want a local's read on the island, reach out directly or browse the Coronado neighborhood guide on propiedadesensandiego.com.